SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
Elisabeth Rodgers narrates this audiobook eloquently, paying attention to the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of her subject. Her tone, style, and pace suit this thoughtful work’s wide-ranging content. The author, a professor of the history of the book, leads the listener on a world tour of this iconic object, which she convincingly argues was the original mass-marketed product, and shows its iterations from handcrafted volume to ebook as it mirrored technological innovations. Price shares entertaining anecdotes—Hemingway’s copy of ULYSSES looks unread—and revealing details: Japanese people read on smartphones, the French on computers, Americans on Kindles. Books persist and evolve, as do libraries, bookstores, and places we read. This audiobook overflows with insights. Anyone who loves to listen to and/or read books will enjoy this revelatory audiobook. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
…Price's book—unlike other examples of what she calls "autobibliography"—is funny and hopeful, rather than dour and pious…What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is an enjoyable tour, full of surprising byways into historical arcana…
Publishers Weekly
06/17/2019
Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain), a Rutgers English professor and the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative, combines a lighthearted romp through literary history with a serious intent: to argue that the rise of e-texts is not the radical change often claimed. In fact, Price argues, change is the norm in print history: the world moved from papyrus to parchment to paper, and from scrolls to codices to books, while books themselves have changed from giant medieval compilations of parchment chained in place, to early-20th-century pocketbooks printed on onionskin. Price notes that with the advent of e-texts, physical books have a newly elevated status based in nostalgia for a pre-electronic era—and are increasingly employed as therapy, their purpose displaced from the joy of reading to self-improvement. Price’s factual tidbits are entertaining: for example, the first vegetarian cookbook was, ironically, bound with and printed on animal skins. However, her penchant for labored analogies—“Print is to digital as Madonna is to whore”—will strain even the most forgiving reader’s patience. Nevertheless, Price provides welcome comfort that the beloved book is in good shape, regardless of the form it ultimately takes. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"Price's book-unlike other examples of what she calls 'autobibliography'-is funny and hopeful, rather than dour and pious...What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is an enjoyable tour, full of surprising byways into historical arcana."—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"[Price] is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter need not be a form of nostalgia...Her radiant descriptions of the physical properties of books, the forensic traces-from smudges to candle wax-of earlier bodies holding them, immediately sent me to the Internet..."—Dan Chiasson, New Yorker
"A witty, tonic rebuttal to the latest round of doomsday prognostications about the fate of literature."—Wall Street Journal
"Price's premise, that there truly was no golden age of reading that we should be trying to get back to, is presented with humor and charm...Those still worried that technology has spoiled their attention span shouldn't be."—Booklist
"Predictions of the death of the book weren't only greatly exaggerated; as Leah Price notes in What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, they were old news. The book has survived numerous death sentences in the past, and this time, as before, it's been the occasion to reinvent old practices of reading. What the Victorians called "furniture books" continue to adorn coffee tables and the Ikea shelves widened to accommodate them. People still hold books in their laps on couches and in coaches (enjoying the "library atmosphere" of Amtrak quiet cars). Self-help books have their roots the "bibliotherapy" proposed a century ago. It is still a very bookish world that we inhabit, and I know of no guide to it more witty and engaging than Leah Price, whose insights, erudition, and apercus had me dog-earing every other page."—Geoff Nunberg, resident linguist, NPR's Fresh Air
"Eye-opening and filled with delightful nuggets of truth, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books offers no nostalgia for a more tranquil reading past but rather a hopeful glimpse into an essential reading future."—BookPage
"A deeply researched and deeply fun-to-read reassurance that there is still hope for books-and that there always has been."—Shelf Awareness
"Price combines a lighthearted romp through literary history with a serious intent: to argue that the rise of e-texts is not the radical change often claimed...Provides welcome comfort that the beloved book is in good shape, regardless of the form it ultimately takes."—Publishers Weekly
"Price is one of the most interesting and provocative writers on books of her generation...[She] doesn't so much build arguments as allow ideas to explode on the page, detonating chain reactions as she goes. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books not only does its talking in original ways but also makes us think intensely about what books are."—Literary Review
"Books are not dead. That's the good news in this set of bookish essays...Readers who enjoy books about books will find much to like here."—Kirkus
"Pithy and compact...[Price is] an engagingly breezy writer with a real talent for a clever phrase, and she wears her expansive learning lightly."—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"No one writes about books-and their bookness-with anything close to the daunting curiosity and dazzling acuity of the inimitable Leah Price. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is a rags to paper to Amazon Kindle bookshelf of delight and instruction, as entertaining as it is illuminating."—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
"Leah Price's radiantly intelligent book makes us rethink and re-view the endlessly alive, endlessly shape-shifting and self-reinventing activity that is reading. Its cracking readability — when was the last time you had to disable the wifi for a book on books? — should not disguise how cogently and coherently it is argued, and the depth of learning with which its arguments are meticulously substantiated. It is also profoundly witty, funny, and beautifully written (when was the last time you thought that about a book on books?). You emerge, after turning the last page, a smarter, better informed, joyous person."—Neel Mukherjee, Man Booker Prize-finalist author of The Lives of Others and A State of Freedom
"At once authoritative and accessible, Price's account busts many myths about both the past and the future of reading. Long may it keep us talking about books!"—William H. Sherman, Director, Warburg Institute, University of London
"As entertaining as it is insightful, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is part history, part social commentary, part memoir, and fully engaging. Leah Price pithily assesses the uses of books past and present, and upends assumptions about the future of books in a digital age. Her contagious delight in books makes this book a delight."—Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
"A dizzying, myth-busting history of reading. Upends a whole toolbox of old saws about readers' habits."—Keith Houston, author of The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
Elisabeth Rodgers narrates this audiobook eloquently, paying attention to the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of her subject. Her tone, style, and pace suit this thoughtful work’s wide-ranging content. The author, a professor of the history of the book, leads the listener on a world tour of this iconic object, which she convincingly argues was the original mass-marketed product, and shows its iterations from handcrafted volume to ebook as it mirrored technological innovations. Price shares entertaining anecdotes—Hemingway’s copy of ULYSSES looks unread—and revealing details: Japanese people read on smartphones, the French on computers, Americans on Kindles. Books persist and evolve, as do libraries, bookstores, and places we read. This audiobook overflows with insights. Anyone who loves to listen to and/or read books will enjoy this revelatory audiobook. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-05-26
Books are not dead. That's the good news in this set of bookish essays.
It wasn't long ago, writes Rutgers Book Initiative founding director Price (How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, 2012, etc.), that writers such as Sven Birkerts and Robert Coover were remarking, and sometimes lamenting, the supposed decline of the book in favor of other technologies—the computer, the e-reader, etc. In fact, reading physical books is on the rise, and in December 2018, holiday shoppers found several popular titles on back order for "that most old-fashioned of crises: a paper shortage." The widespread availability of digital devices doesn't seem to have put much of a dent in the market for physical books, though new technologies have certainly affected reading in the past—most notably, Price archly observes, TV. What has really cut into reading time, she adds, is the in-between time we used to devote to reading books and newspapers, the time spent on bus-stop benches or commuter trains, time now so often given to navigating the many iterations of social media. Books as objects seem safe, then, though mysteries still surround them: Those data crunchers who use electronic tools to see what books people are looking at most still can't answer why we're looking at them. As Price writes, in a nice turn, "no matter how many keystrokes you track and blinks you time, others' reading remains as hard to peer into as others' hearts." The essays suggest more than form a single coherent argument about the book today, but Price's ideas that books are a communal thing and that reading them, in at least one sense, is a profoundly social act are pleasing even if libraries are now different from our childhood memories and if those books come in many forms besides between covers.
Readers who enjoy books about books will find much to like here.
